Hacker News Clones

Every once in a while, I’ll have a post gain traction over on ye ole’ orange site (Hacker News).

I find out about it because my analytics digest will get a yuge uptick in page views.

What’s interesting is all the referral sources that show up in my analytics. The Hacker News is always at the top, but then after it comes a bunch of clones or related “scraped tech news” sites.

I sometimes click through just to see them and marvel at what an interesting, diverse place the web is and all the people building on it.

Here’s a list of the ones that showed up in my analytics recently:

• hckrnews.com
• hackerweb.app
• hn.premii.com
• hn.algolia.com
• brutalist.report
• hnrss.org
• hackurls.com
• hn.svelte.dev
• news.hada.io
• hntoplinks.com
• progscrape.com
• spike.news
• serializer.io
• news.social-protocols.org
• hackernews.betacat.io
• old.thenews.im

While I personally don’t spend a lot of time on Hacker News, I kinda love that the site exists, gets so much traffic, and AFAIK the owners aren’t actively seeking to make every last pageview happen on their domain (news.ycombinator.com).

I kinda love that there are still places on the web where people can explore creating alternative experiences without being shut down because they are outside the officially-sanctioned environment.